Work

Other Projects

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers, “what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?” Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed, and perhaps mildly exaggerated by Steve and Packard to create a series of 6 posters for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street Program (official press release).

Catalog Essay by Stephen Duncombe

If “politics is the art of the possible,” as the 19th century German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck once wrote, then what sort of politics are Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert proposing with their posters? Movable skyscrapers. A martial arts studio on a BART train. Public transit by elephant back. Commuting by zip line. Transforming San Francisco into wildlife refuge. Turning a football stadium into a farm (and linebackers into human plows). Every one of these proposals for our “awesome future” is patently impossible. Urban planning is a serious business: the domain of accredited academics, trained technicians and pragmatic politicians. What’s proposed by Jennings and Lambert – artists, of all things – is not serious at all.